E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

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Elisabeth Moss - mostly a TV actor so far - is perhaps the televisual equivalent of Kristen Stewart (who she appeared with in On The Road) at this stage in time - the world's most enthralling and important young female icon in their medium - she is acting's Taylor Swift, as it were. Or, this generation's Gillian Anderson, perhaps.

Moss has an impeccable TV resume - as a young person she appeared in two major shows - Picket Fences and The West Wing - both considered key to their periods. More recently, she was central to Mad Men, along with The Wire, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, the most significant TV series of the past two decades.

Meanwhile she is brilliant and again central in two vitally important more recent feminist TV shows - Top of the Lake and The Handmaid's Tale - each superbly-made.

Her characters Peggy Olson, Offred and Robin Griffin are as important to this century as any we can think of. That's what being an icon is. And she inspires more than young…

August was once (still is?) called the Silly Season, because less news happened then. Indeed, Malcolm Bradbury's classic novel of the 70s, The History Man, opens with a page on the subject. Ironic, because more than one war has started in August - no month is ahistorical, apolitical. Even the name August refers to an imperial figure. Our editor went away for a fortnight to relax, and like the rest of the world, has witnessed one of the least pleasant August's in living memory, in terms at any rate, of the news.

No point in rehearsing the obvious: Donald Trump and his administration are the worst since Nixon's, and may well be worse. Nixon himself toyed with using nukes in Asia, and harboured hard-hatted rednecks as allies. But the refusal over the weekend to properly condemn extreme-right actions is breathtakingly un-American and unsettling. America has not been as unwelcoming to non-whites since Reagan - probably since the end of Jim Crow.

Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan (not the 1958 film with John Mills and Richard Attenborough) may well be the summer movie event of 2017, just as Saving Private Ryan was the autumn event of roughly 20 years ago (the same year Nolan's Following debuted). However, whereas the earlier WW2 classic featured a bravura beach invasion of Europe scene unrivalled in contemporary film, and was directed by the leading blockbuster film-maker of our time, Spielberg, this new movie features death on a beach where the soldiery are seeking to escape the beachhead and the seabed, equally, and exit Europe (at least mainland). It was the first Brexit, as it were, and as endless pundits are muttering, and that forsaken politics does shade some of the gung-ho little England flag-waving at the end.

More pointedly, the new film is an attempt to outdo Spielberg, but also Kubrick, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott, potential rivals to Nolan, whose immaculate, precise, and intelligent space, comic boo…

Dominic LeonardRunner-up, Meg EdenDominic Leonard is an undergraduate studying English at Christ Church,
Oxford. His poems have appeared in IRIS, the Oxford Review of Books, The
Kindling and the Poetry Business Book of New Poets (forthcoming), and in 2017
he won the Poetry Live competition. He is the President of Oxford University
Poetry Society for 2017-18. Judge's Citation (by Oliver Jones) This
fortnight's raft of submissions contained many poems remarkable in their
willingness to push their poet's expressive range to the very edge of
non-sequitur. None did so with such superb panache as Dominic Leonard's
winning submission, which stretched personification to its logical limit
- as did our runner up, Meg Eden in the highly effective 'Alzheimers, In Which My
Grandmother Is A Blueberry Bush'.Dominic's
gift for accelerating his abstractions up to an impressive tempo is typical of
a cluster of emerging British poets - Daisy Lafarge springs to mind, as
does A…

THE EYEWEAR FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE is now into its 4th iteration, this time judged by Oliver Jones, and the shortlist is cheekily extended by 2 to 16! Who will win the £140? Stay tuned until tomorrow's announcement... congratulations to all these fine poets, from Australia to America, and in-between...

Alison Palmer for‘Felling Trees’Cassandra Cleghorn for ‘Drunkle, After Rehab’Dominic Leonard for ‘No God Is Like A Vapour’...Eliza Mimski for ‘At Seventy’Ellen Girardeau Kempler for ‘Inauguration Blues’Emily Osborne for ‘Four Drawers’Greer Gurland for ‘Chapter Three’Kate Ennals for ‘Heidegger's Truth’Lynne Burnett for ‘It Rains For Him’M.E. MacFarland for ‘A Halo And Some Doves’Masa Torbica for ‘Landscapes’Meg Eden for ‘Alzheimers, In which My Grandmother is a Blueberry Bush’Phill Provance for ‘Triangle’Sarah Carey for ‘Accommodations’Seanin Hughes for ‘Pink Is A Sister Sick’Wes Lee for ‘They Say We Made It Up’

In tough times, Eyewear is continuing to grow and develop this rather special, fast-paced, 14-day turnaround poetry prize.

This time the judge was Ms Rosanna Hildyard, our senior editor at Eyewear, and an Oxford graudate, who has written a new translation of Pere Ubu which we will be publishing shortly. The 4th edition of the contest opens today with our judge being Oliver Jones, a poet, editor, and author of a critical survey of Trump's rhetoric.